


on the (un)becoming of a hero

by TobermorianSass



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection, POV Multiple, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 17:13:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15912696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/pseuds/TobermorianSass
Summary: Wanda Maximoff and Nick Fury talk redemption, heroism, and ethics in the wake of the battle of Novi Grad.





	on the (un)becoming of a hero

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [MaximoffFicExchange2018](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/MaximoffFicExchange2018) collection. 



> **Prompt:**  
>   
> 
> Wanda and Nick Fury talking about redemption, heroism, and ethics. Either the MCU or Marvel Ultimates, pretty please. :)
> 
> I tried to stay as much within the bounds of the prompt but it did end up much less upbeat than I thought it would and both Wanda & Nick turned out to be very prickly people to write in relation to each other. I hope you like this, if you prompted it!
> 
> Big thank you to EssayOfThoughts for betaing this!

How to be a hero:

1: ?

* * *

“Miss Maximoff.”

She hasn’t been told what to call him yet; Clint calls him Director, but she’s looked and he’s no Director anymore — he’s dead. An invisible, dead man standing alive in front of her and indicating a chair like she imagines the Director of a secret military project might. Firm, commanding. Expectant.

He doesn’t think she could turn around and leave. But she could. She doesn’t, but she could.

She’s been reading again, of late. HYDRA gave her manuals, all of them five hundred maybe six hundred pages long and with titles the Doctor used to turn into code (HT, HREI — _ai-rey_ he used to say); innocent until she opened the manuals and began to read. Human Resource Training. Information Acquisition. Self-Defence. Survival. Human Resource Exploitation. Once, she opened her Field Resources manual at random and stared at the six-step panelled image, saucepan, water, beans, wire, circuit, dynamite before she closed it and closed her eyes and thought of the letters glowering at her in the dark: S (es) T (tay, the Doctor used to say) A, R (air) K. STARK. One good turn deserved another.

Like everything HYDRA gave to her, these were double-edged. Euphemisms, like cuckoo eggs. The Doctor had firm ideas about what they might or might not read. Perhaps, she thinks, they made it easy for HYDRA. He would gesture and all he had to say, with a downward slant of his mouth was _lies_ . _Their_ lies. Perhaps if they — SHIELD or STARK or THE CIA — told fewer lies, she might have understood why the Doctor wanted them to read only the manuals. No more, no less.

Now there is no Doctor to give her another reading assignment, another lesson in pretend or existence as HYDRA, which itself is only pretend. She knows this now, so she’s been reading again of late and mapping the web of lies between what she was told, taught, allowed and the tangible, touchable truth. Of late, she has been working on psychology, of body language and the way people talk without realizing they’re talking which in HYDRA went into Section 4.8 on Human Resource Exploitation and Section 5.9c on Information Acquisition. Or simply: recruitment, manipulation, interrogation.

What it means is: he leads — no, he’s used to leading. He wears it as easily as his long dark coat or that dark eyepatch.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he says. “Barton says you’re a good kid.”

“My brother saved him,” she says, by way of unexplanation.

“And you lost him.”

Her fingers twitch automatically at the words. “My brother died a hero.” _At least_.

They were saving Sokovia. First, they were _going_ to — till HYDRA showed its hand. They were saving themselves. They were saving mama and papa. They were saving Sokovia. Times change quickly, but at least when Pietro went he went making mama and papa proud (doing what they first started out to do: saving Sokovia).

“And now you want to be an Avenger.”

Fury has what the movies call a poker face. Wanda scowls at him. He thinks he has her mapped, like every other person he has interviewed in tiny cafes, across tinier, poorly-cleaned tables. Maybe even at this same table: a history of Bartons, Natashas, Captains, Starks sitting where she sits now.

“Barton —”

“Barton,” he says, “talks a lot of shit. What do you know about the Avengers Initiative, Miss Maximoff?”

“They exist,” she replies, without missing a beat.

“Very funny.”

She half-shrugs. “Would you like me to tell you what HYDRA told me? Or what they said on the news?”

“No I do not want to know what HYDRA said —”

She cuts him off. “Why not? That’s what this is, no?”

“An interview?” he replies. “No. And this isn’t intel either.”

A hundred different news segments, watched on television screens mounted on the inside of stores, cafes, the castle, flash through her mind before the scarlet swallows them back into the little locked box she keeps inside the maze she has built for herself. Everything dangerous, disruptive, damning disappears into it. It is the only way to survive.  

“I know only about the Avengers,” she says. Like all Americans they — “they came to save Sokovia. Before that, they came for HYDRA. Saving the world, doing the right thing.”

_Undoing their mistakes._

“But what, Miss Maximoff?”

“What Barton said,” she tells him, so he knows, “is if I stepped out of that door, I would be an Avenger, no matter what I did. And what I would do is fight to kill. I watch the news, Mr Fury. They call us heroes. What kind of heroes does that make us?”

* * *

Whatever the hell a hero is, he’s not one. For as long as there have been people, they’ve been obsessed with heroes: flashy young men (now, women) who put their lives on the line again and again, do some stupid stunts and win the day. Heroes. Guys like Achilles who sit in their tents till it’s all personal for them and they can’t sit around anymore. Agamemnon himself couldn’t get Achilles back on the field with all his promises. No, Agamemnon had to sit back and wait till Achilles came around to the idea of fighting.

Agamemnon couldn’t hold a candle to him. He’s had a hundred percent success rate for seven years running and still counting: took Achilles from his tent over and over and sent him back out onto the field till he stayed there and finished the job. Ulysses, but successful. A nobody man. Sure he had medals for actions classified and public, medals whose purpose and function would only be clear to those who knew what to look for and how to look for it. In the eyes of the state, of a special kind of person, someone deep stateside: he’d be a hero. But a nobody-man kind of hero.

Back when he was still CIA and they had to stay on their toes to know what their enemies thought of them — and the enemy was everywhere: Russia, Angola, Laos, England, Germany, Mexico, right on your doorstep — a band of long-haired disruptors (poets, always) started around singing about them. _Fucking A-man. CIA Man_. Catchy tune, bogeyman lyrics about political ghosts, spun by a couple of white kids who didn’t have a clue. Back then, they were all nobody men; shadows in the dark in a darker war where at least everyone knew who was fighting who, even if the enemy was everywhere. Nobody liked it.

The greatest generation, on the other hand. All that bull? They liked it. Everyone liked it. That was America for you. Greatest generation, the cavalry charge, how the west was won (and for that matter, the East too). Guys you could put a face to and hand out a couple of medals in public award ceremonies — real all-American heroes. The kind who could march into another country and point their machine-guns at a real and tangible enemy in the wrong kind of camos. That was the kind of guy they all wanted. Not just the folks in their comfortable three bedroom houses in the suburbs. The long-haired disruptors too. They made for a nice clean story and everyone likes a nice clean story, in which the matinee star hero fights nice, clean wars, guns blazing and all.

Now a false American hero, on the other hand, couldn’t go marching into another country. The nobody men pulled strings and they didn’t go marching in, no they rappelled, or climbed: sneaked, masqueraded, disguised, jumped, pounced, descended, assassinated. When they were done, it all went into a file that was locked up for private eyes only for the next half a century. By then, someone would have come along and shredded them while someone else filed a report on the unfortunate loss: flood, disaster, decay: an Act of God. God was busy down in the CIA, cleaning up after them. God, no matter what the kids sang, was a friend to all nobody men everywhere.

(Pierce, after Bogota called him a real hero; had them give him a real medal, the kind that came with a name and his deed out in the open. Now he looks back and he wonders where HYDRA sent its tentacles sprawling and whether he’d always been in the wrong and maybe the kids had always had it right: fucking A-man. CIA Man.)

Forty five years and what he knew now was that there were two kinds of heroes. The Ulysses and the Achilles of the world. Ulysses were nobody men. They woke up each day and went to work. Nobody men got the shit done and at the end of the day, came home and went to bed. Nine to five, saving the world from the shadow lines for no other reason except that someone had to do the job. Well it took its toll. They lived without those flashing moments of moral clarity and when they went home, home was a matter of perception. As Nat liked to say, a matter of circumstance. They were headless, rootless creatures: Bartons and Romanoffs, Hills and Coulsons. Natasha once used him as a compass, but he could — _should —_  have told her this was a doomed endeavour. There was no righteous war. There was only the job and the job was going to be done, one damn way or another.

The Achilles of the world needed it to be personal. All or nothing. Grand gestures. They swept in at the last minute with death-defying, sense-defying stunts and maybe God was an Achilles-man too, because they always, _always_ pulled it off. But they needed that personal touch. Something that struck them right there, right at the heart and in just the right way: the perfect blend of fear, love and Freudian bullshit. Why the hell did he pull that stunt with the card, the blood and Coulson. Because he knew, he just knew, he had a crew of Achilles on his hands: stubborn, cranky, selfish, tantruming assholes. And the only way to kick an Achilles off his ass was to hand him a blood-stained card and kick his dormant conscience into action. Stark? Stark was an Achilles all the way down.

So were the rest of them, if he was honest. Freud and crazies right out the wazoo. Real grandstanding hero material.

Every single one of them that’s come his way fits one of these two. Ulysses. Achilles. Achilles. Ulysses. Now Barton’s been elliptical about the girl, or else lacked narrative style. First they were on the wrong sides, then they weren’t and then he was telling the girl she could be an Avenger if she got out of the half-broken antique home — real vintage Europe — they were holed up in with a front seat to whatever bullshit Stark had cooked up for them this time. The threads are hard to follow, though it isn’t hard to find HYDRA’s tentacles carelessly, effortlessly sprawled all over it.

You spend your whole life being the best damn nobody man, only to find out at the end you’ve been outdone by a couple of rip-off Nazis. It’s enough to put a guy off the whole hero business and take up a lifetime of leisure gardening.

Here is, however, the thing. Here is a girl who Barton claims is an Avenger and wants added to the Initiative. The catch? She used to be HYDRA. She says she _used_ to be HYDRA, but there’s no way of telling how much is truth, how much is fiction and how much is HYDRA disinformation because what better way to win than to infiltrate them under false pretenses. God knows, he watched it pioneer in 1969 in Laos to know its rhymes, beats and rhythms.

And funnily enough, none of this goddamn matters. Judge them all on the last three years and none of them stood a chance. Not Hill or Coulson, who’d failed to notice the obvious. Not Romanoff, who’d failed to spot the compass spinning out of control. Not him, sharing an office with what it turns out was evil incarnate and without a goddamn clue. (Pierce, that blue-blooded all-American looking hero, like an apple rotten through and through: attractive and irredeemably, thoroughly a Fake.) The girl wants a second chance, just like him standing in a tiny wooden shed and watching his past lives go up in smoke. As it turns out, none of the HYDRA stains matter because as it turns out, all he wants to know is whether she’s an Achilles or an Ulysses and whether or not she’s going to turn up to do this job, 9 to 5, no excuses and no sitting in tents in morose despair.

People in glass houses. What can he say.

* * *

He folds his hands and places them on the table. “The question Miss Maximoff is what kind of hero do _you_ want to be?”

The girl sinks lower into her chair. She’s what — twenty? Eighteen? She’s hunched up and folded in the way teens do when they do and do not want to be seen. But no. He’s seen this before. 1991, across the aisle of the church. A closed funeral, insofar as anyone with as many varied interests as Howard Stark could have a closed funeral: security alone mandated the doors open up for SHIELD, whose only interest was protecting its many investments. This was why he was there in the back of the church, discreetly behind Pierce, who was there in a _personal_ capacity though he stayed away from the kid. But he, Nicky, watched the kid from his pew at the back: hunched up and folded into himself in his suit and smart black patent leather shoes, right next to the pair of coffins up front.

Death. Grief. It sat heavy on Tony, two decades ago. It sits heavy on her just like it did back then.

“Let me rephrase that,” he says. “Why did you walk out of that door in Sokovia?”

“I know why I did what I did — why _we_ did what we did,” she says. “I only want to know it won’t —”

She leans forward, dark and lank hair elongating the dark shadows on her cheeks, under her eyes: “ _You_ know what SHIELD did. Was. I don’t want that, again.”

“And you want what from me?”

“Reassurance,” she says. Then sharply: “You’re not answering my question.”

Something about her dark eyes remind him of Nat — younger, a duck out of water and yet self-possessed as she ran her fingers along the polished table-top and her eyes darted around, taking in the debriefing room in all its minutiae.

“When they came,” she continues in a low voice, “they promised us the same power as the Avengers. Try us, the Doctor said. They could have promised revenge, but they talked only about power. So much power to give, my — brother — and I never questioned it. Americans — they are like that. Always, it’s power. Who has it, who gives it, who could give it, who could help them have it. They could speak that language. But whatever you have heard about my — P — my brother and I is wrong.”

Blandly, he asks her: “what am I supposed to have heard?”

“That we wanted revenge,” she says. “We wanted to hurt, to kill, to destroy.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Who wouldn’t?” she replies. “But they kept telling us they could make us powerful when we only wanted to save Sokovia before it was too late.”

“And you left because —”

“Yes,” she said. “I saw what I saw in Ultron’s mind. I wanted to save. Do you understand now, why I ask you what I am going to be?”

“I can’t make you promises.”

“You created this,” she says. “You believed in something.”

“And I was cheated too, Miss Maximoff,” he answers, letting the sharpness creep into his voice. Three years isn’t enough to blunt the betrayal. “Whatever the initiative started out as, it’s evolved and it will continue to evolve right under your nose. Maybe even in ways you won’t like.”

Her eyes flash red for a moment, before they turn dark again.

There have been moments in the past three years when he’s tried to recreate himself, age eighteen and entering the army. Nostalgia beckons, it always does, but hindsight has armed him against its manifold charms. Nick Fury, age eighteen, the portrait of a secret agent in the making: pragmatic, devoted, patriotic, student of a world neatly demarcated in black and white, a real cold warrior. Hindsight tells him this kid is an idiot who’ll get burnt, who’ll learn not to trust but not fast enough to prevent HYDRA’s tentacles slithering into SHIELD’s most secret corridors.

“If I give you a simple answer now and it turns out to be wrong, whose fault is it?” he asks her. “You, for wanting it, or me for giving it to you? What’s a hero, Miss Maximoff? Depends on how you define what it means. Never failing? We're all fuck-ups. Everyone makes mistakes. It's how you recover that counts. Our recovery time is measured in milliseconds. Doing the right thing? I spent my whole goddamn life doing the right thing for the wrong people. Does one right cancel out ten wrongs? Anyone who answers that question is a liar.”

“So you’re saying you don’t know.”

“Doesn’t stop me from turning up to do my job.”

Her mouth quirks up in half a grin. “Not even when you’re dead.”

“Especially not the dead,” he says. “Only the living get to live without their consciences nagging at them.”

The hook lands. He remembers Nat, again, across the varnished table-top, looking up suddenly from examining her fingernails when he first said this to her, or a variation on the theme. The words are absent from the memory, muffled and dimmed with time. Death, in their profession, was a matter of skill. He couldn’t ask her to die for them right then, but Nat knew what he meant when he said it.

Wanda Maximoff merely looks thoughtful. She’s still an unknowable quantity, but everything Clint’s told him has told him all he needs to know: torn-up country, false promises, next thing they know they’re in way over their head and they’re doing things they don’t want to. So what then? They want out. So they turn.

It’s a classic. Every defection he’s ever handled, every recruit, distilled, refined and perfected into this precise moment.

“Depends on the kind of living,” she tells him.

“If you were the same person who signed up to HYDRA, would you be here?” He doesn’t answer her question. “Death comes in more ways than one, but you don’t leave your past selves behind till your conscience kicks you. _That_ is the only thing that matters.”

“Then you don’t mean the living at all,” she replies. “But the ones who can see inside. It’s not enough to know what’s right and wrong. I knew what was right and wrong when I went. You think I didn’t know? But sometimes you can close your eyes —”

“And closing your eyes, forget.”

She looks at him, surprised.

“You forget, Miss Maximoff,” he says as gently as he can. “I’ve been doing this fifty years longer than you have.”

* * *

It wasn’t long after the scarlet settled into her bones that she first started to guess. Difficult to remember now what happened in those early days: vaguely, she remembers a glass box and a pair of wooden cubes and her mind, as boundaryless as the sea (age nine, at the seaside on the Adriatic, staring at the line where sea and sky blended into each other) and still expanding, reaching, grasping outwards. Difficult to remember, when it was space — vast and empty and infinite and _hungry —_  inside her mind then.

But there was a glass box, a pair of wooden cubes and in another glass box — P — her brother.

She thinks now, perhaps it was all the secrets. Everything, underground, or else in the castle — if you went into the forest and looked up at its dark windows, you’d never know that inside, they were conducting experiments on real, live humans. So little natural light, so little artificial light. She relearned her brother’s face in the long dim shadows: dark circles made darker and deeper without the light, gaunt cheeks hollowed and alien with the shifting dark. Leave aside the absence of light and there was — how could she begin to explain it. Half-finished sentences, so much science talk — four syllable words that went nowhere, meant nothing — so much euphemism; the Baron who would look at them and whisper _miracles_ as though they could not hear. As though _she_ could not hear, could not pluck those words out of the scarlet tide and cling to them for later.

List, himself. One day, the scarlet tugging her to look, look carefully: List watching with secret triumph in his eyes. Not pride, triumph. A man triumphant, about to play his winning card, so much like the boys who would play with tattered cards on the street and light up when they were about to win the pile of coins and trinkets in-between them. This was not how their teacher used to look at her favorite students. Or how, perhaps, she’d always imagined Van Gogh might step back and gaze on himself when he had finally put the last brushstroke to canvas — his name, in black scrawl, in the bottom-most corner of the painting.

The octopus.

But none of it mattered, not even the truth. The truth was the rage that ran thick through her veins, thicker than the scarlet. Long before HYDRA there was the bomb and truly, it was never just about protecting. How could it be, when there was a bomb lying unexploded next to her while her brother’s hands squeezed her waist and they waited until slowly, in her dreams, she ceased to be Wanda Maximoff, living, breathing human and slowly, her flesh melted into the rubble and her bones became the titanium and steel casing and her heart became the closed circuit of the bomb: dysfunctional, broken, inhuman.

In the twenty-first century, bombs were heroes too.

Perhaps she was too young when she first dreamed it and began scribbling it on tissues and in the back of her schoolbooks. Only thirteen and with only her brother in all the world. How to be a hero. She composed it as a list. One step for every stage, till the transformation into hero occurred. At first this was only one step long (be good). Over the years it became three, then six, then five, then seven steps. Finally, she traced them on the glass walls of the box, her fingers leaving behind translucent half visible ghost-trails only she could see.

HOW TO BE A HERO

DIE/LIVE

RAGE/MUTATE

DEVOUR/DESTROY

FLY! FLY! FLY! FLY! FLY! FLY!

This was unlike the first list (be good, help people, save the world), the second (be good, help people, fight crime, save Sokovia, save the world) , the third (hide face, help the weak, destroy all injustice, save Sokovia, save all people) and the fourth (gain special world-saving skills, hide face, destroy the strong, destroy all injustice, destroy the Avengers, save Sokovia, save all people). Everything about this one came from the dark womb of the glass cage. A picture emerged from the fragments in the rubble: herself, leaning against the glass, and breathing open-mouthed so she could use the condensation to trace the words. She wasn’t trying to frighten them, though it was naked terror on their faces when they saw the words she’d scribbled on the glass. What she remembered was revelation, of purpose crystallizing like the cobalt their teacher showed them, crystallizing and turning white as the water evaporated.

There was only one common thread in all her lists. Destruction. Of the strong, of injustice, of wrongs. Of the Avengers. Of the bomb. The transformation into a hero was the same as the transformation into a bomb. But a bomb was an imprecise instrument. Its aim was general, its purview geographical and random. A criminal outside the range of the bomb would escape. An innocent, caught under its shell, would die. Thus, the arbitrariness of the bomb.

The hero, on the other hand, was a precise instrument of destruction. Like a surgeon’s scalpel scraping away dead skin. Aim carefully, hit a precise and singular target. No random appointed coordinates, but a singular person at a single point in time committing some terrible act of evil. Or aiming to commit some terrible act of evil, dreaming of a terrible act of evil and with the means to enact it. That was how Ultron came to them, promised them revenge and more than just revenge because by then, it was clear the Avengers were not the heroes they claimed to be. They were as imprecise, as blunt as the force of a bomb landing on a civilian population. STARK, deployed inside a city, inside their small civilian lives.

She was wrong. Ultron was wrong. They were all wrong. They were only what happened if she pulled on that thread. Destroy and nothing was left. Destroy: she was lying under the rubble, breathing dust as her hair stood on end and she felt the cold-hot crawl of metal on her fingers and skin and as her heart slowed to the steady metre of the timer: tick, tick, tick. All things reached the conclusion of the atom bomb, the least precise instrument of justice, if they went that way.

Fury doesn’t know what he’s asking when he asked her why she walked out of the door. He cannot see what happened in the dark, in the moments between Barton leaving and her alone with the sound of war around her. He does not know how she sat in the dark and piece by piece, removed the shards of imaginary metal; how the process had begun long before when her mind touched Ultron’s twisted attempt at creation. All the lists she’d made to herself, the driftwood memories, the scraps of collected hate assembled into a working machine and now slowly pulled apart till only the wires and the skeletal remains clung to her.

And then she sat in the rubble ruins and held Ultron’s metal heart in her hands, the scarlet coursing through her: a closed, complete circuit, threaded through a metal contraption of its own. Her own heart, functional and dangerous and beating slowly to the metre of the invisible bomb: tick, tick, tick.

What Fury doesn’t know is how after Sokovia, she removed that metal contraption and placed it in the grave with her brother.

* * *

How to be a hero:

1: Do Not.

* * *

“Right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder,” he’s saying. “You want absolutes? Go somewhere else. We can try and save as many people as we can, but we can’t save everyone. That, is a matter of fact.”

 _I have to_. “But we can try.”

“And we fail,” he replies. “And then we tie a knot and move on.”

“So simple.”

It sounds so cruel to say it and yet, he is not wrong. There is no going back. All the stories in which children learn how to fast forward time end with them realizing they cannot put back the years they’ve let escape. All the stories in which men travel backwards destroy the present, fragment it into an unbearable, shattered mess. If she could, she would reach backwards and pull her brother out alive. Pull Novi Grad, Sokovia, herself — her mama and papa — out alive.

But she cannot. They are not this clever yet. They have not invented this, though they might, one day. Easy to say, tie a knot, move on. He is, like her, the victim of HYDRA’s many lies. But he does not carry with him the weight of his people, destroyed by his own self-absorbed desire for revenge. His choice. Her choice.

“If you want complicated, Stark can sign you up to a Philosophy course at NYU,” he tells her dryly. “My job is not to hold your hand. It’s to put you in the field, or resettle you within SHIELD protocols if you choose to leave.”

Not an interview. Not intel. Evaluation.

And why shouldn’t they evaluate her? They knew nothing about her. Barton trusted her, but after she reached into their minds and pulled at the strings that held them together, they couldn’t look on her with anything but distrust. She herself was a foreigner in her own body. Betrayed by her own self, now a dead and buried self — but her, always her.

“No one can save me,” she says, more to herself than to him, staring at her blurred reflection in the polished table-top.

“Correct.”

In the wood she sees: his head tilted, watching. Waiting. Next to his hand, the newspaper, neatly folded in half but not enough to hide the picture or the headline. Novi Grad, ruined. Sokovia, bankrupted. No relief for her home and all of it from the same scarlet twisted up inside her.

“How long?” she asks him.

The blurred reflection turns and follows the line of her gaze.

“For as long as you remember it,” he replies.

Forever.

He’s right. The forgiving is the easy bit. The memory stays. It’s better it does. For as long as she remembers, she will know how to weigh her steps. For as long as she lives, she will remember the church and the scarlet unfurling like a monster while her home floats miles above the sky and in her mind, the panicked drumming of thought in time to the ticking of the timer inside her heart: you did this, you did this, you did this. Atonement without memory — impossible. Without it, she might find it easy to slip back onto the path List first held out to her.

“You’ll always be a little messed up,” he continues. “Call it a professional hazard. But if you’ve been burned and can’t shut your eyes, you might just sleep ten minutes longer this way.”

She was going to save Sokovia. Or she would fight, carrying the memory in the hollow of the places where the bomb had once melted into her. And now —

“I only want to know this won’t be another mistake,” she says. “I only want to do right.”

“Then you turn up and fight. Every single one of them is out there fighting for an idea they believe is right.”

What about you, she wants to say. But he says _them_ with deliberation (another note from her new book, on the anatomy of speech) and she cannot cross the drawn line.

He cannot promise her more. He’s a realist, a pragmatist. She is not. Thus, the unmeetable twain. He will not promise her more than he can safely assure her. The risk is less this way: when she fails, he fails, they fail, there will be no turning, no sudden and violent disposition. This is how he protects them both: himself, from the reproach and her, from the danger, the risks, her own volatile guilt and grief and earnest desire to prove herself capable of doing right.

She will have entered, eyes already open and protected from the delusions of a grander world.

* * *

How to be a hero:

1: Recognize all people deserve saving.

2: Do not.

* * *

Like him, she will have a job. From nine to five, enter, train, learn. Perhaps she will even fight HYDRA on behalf of all misguided and unloved orphans. At five she will put it all away and become Wanda Maximoff again. There will be no grand gestures, no hubris, no dreaming of flying away and saving the world or else becoming its destruction. She will do overtime. She will, like the rest of the world, become defined by this.

(They might, in time, look at her and call her a hero too. This does not matter. This is not the purpose.)

“Then I must do what I must,” she tells him, with a sharp nod.

**Author's Note:**

> The six-step bean-bomb Wanda finds in one of the books HYDRA gave her was pulled from an old 60s/70s era CIA handbook a friend of mine found floating around the internet.
> 
> The song Nick Fury references is _CIA Man_ by The Fugs. In point of fact, one of the core members of The Fugs is Jewish so Nick Fury is mildly wrong in blithely dismissing them as "white boys". 
> 
> I'm only ten percent sorry for the classics butchery going on in here.


End file.
